This is kind of incredible.
You’ll recall that back in the summer the Cooper Union administration negotiated the end to a student occupation of the college president’s office by agreeing, among other things, to place an elected student on Cooper’s board of trustees. In October the trustees announced the framework under which that student trustee would be chosen, and the process has been moving forward since then.
Today it was announced that the winner of the campus-wide election to select the student trustee will not be seated as previously agreed. No student, in fact, will be seated on the board until at least March. Why? Mostly because the process the students followed to select their representative was too democratic.
I should probably back up.
The process for choosing the student trustee that was announced in October was pretty complicated. In it, the student body would elect a pool of three candidates from which the trustees’ membership committee would choose a winner. Despite the fact that this setup violated the trustees’ summer agreement to establish a mechanism “for the election of a student representative,” the Joint Student Council, which had been given responsibility for implementing the procedure, chose not to boycott. They took nominations,
